The Challenge
Marine crews rotate. A new captain steps aboard a vessel they've never seen before. The previous captain spent six weeks getting to know the quirks of this specific ship — which cylinder always runs slightly hot, which fuel pump is finicky, which weather the engine room copes badly with. The handover is a brief in-person walkthrough plus a stack of paperwork, and then the new captain sails. Worse: expert advice given to one crew ("your equipment is acting strange — probably because of this") often never reaches the next one. At its core this is a communication problem — how do we make sure crucial information survives the handover? Handing the new crew a 20-page report and trusting they read it is not the answer. The same failure mode exists in any shift-rotation environment, from process plants to hospital shift changes.

The Data
The briefing draws on two layers. Static data: what is on board — equipment inventory, engine type and surrounding subsystems, reference materials and manuals (every vessel is different: a cargo vessel and a bulk carrier may share almost nothing, so "here is where to find the manual for this system" is already valuable). Dynamic data: what has happened — logbook entries, alerts and incidents from navigational and automation subsystems, and known-but-not-yet-resolved issues flagged by remote experts analysing the vessel's data in the cloud.

Mission
Build a crew-handover briefing generator, in phases. Start with the static layer: compile "here is what you're taking over" — equipment, reference links, manuals — into a single structured onboarding briefing, everything in one place. Then layer in the dynamic history: compress the most important crew-relevant patterns, incidents and open expert advisories into a briefing the incoming crew will actually absorb. Design the ingestion interfaces to be document-agnostic, so nothing in the pipeline depends on maritime data standards — the same engine should brief a hospital shift as easily as a ship's crew. Test the briefing format with experienced operators for clarity, trust and adoption.

Why we suggest this
Rotating crews lose institutional knowledge at every handover. Compressed, AI-generated briefings tailored to the specific equipment a new crew is taking over solve a problem that exists in any shift-rotation industry — vessels, process plants, hospitals, security operations. Underexplored as a product area. *Project will use AI-generated synthetic operational histories; anonymised real handover/incident report examples from the partner serve as a reference for structure and content.*